Global Courant
The launch of a new RISC-V software association makes designing integrated circuits according to open standards and open-source software even more challenging for the US government’s efforts to halt the development of Chinese high-tech and bend Europe to its geopolitical will .
On May 31, Linux Foundation Europe announced the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), describing it as:
a new collaborative effort that brings together world industry leaders committed to accelerating the availability of software for high-performance and power-efficient RISC-V cores (processing units) with high-performance operating systems for a variety of market segments.
Those market segments include cloud computing, data centers, automobiles, mobile phones, and other consumer electronics. Hosted by Linux Foundation Europe, RISE supports the global open standards activities of RISC-V International.
Gabriele Columbro, CEO of Linux Foundation Europe, notes that,
The RISE project aims to enable RISC-V in open source tools and libraries (LLVM and GCC, etc.) to accelerate implementation and time to market. RISC-V is a cornerstone of the European technology and industrial landscape, so we are honored to provide a neutral, trusted home for the RISE project under Linux Foundation Europe.
Gabriele Columbro, Gabriele Columbro, Managing Director of Linux Foundation Europe. Photo: Twitter
Thirteen companies from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China make up RISE’s Board of Directors: NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Samsung, Google, Andes, Red Hat, Imagination Technologies, Rivos, SiFive, Ventana and T-Head.
It is important that T-Head is included. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Alibaba, a fabulous semiconductor design company that develops application-specific ICs for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, industrial, financial, consumer electronics and other applications. In fact, it is the semiconductor division of the Alibaba group.
According to T-Head Vice President Jianyi Meng,
T-Head has contributed to the software ecosystem through initiatives such as placing various operating systems on RISC-V and contributing to an integrated development environment for the RISC-V community. Together with other global business leaders on the RISE project and our partners in various industries, we can further drive the growth of the open source software ecosystem.
At a conference in Shanghai in early March, Meng said:
The development of RISC-V requires global innovation collaboration, from chips to software, applications and terminals. T-Head brings together key ecosystems so that global developers and partners can better use and develop RISC-V technologies.
At that time, T-Head and Alipay also announced plans to enable secure payments on portable devices using built-in RISC-V processors.
The rise of RISC-V, particularly in China, is likely to be a negative for Arm and its Japanese owner Softbank, which plans to list Arm later this year. Arm’s proprietary instruction set architectures are considered risky by the Chinese due to the potential US influence over their owner.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on computer design principles with reduced instruction sets. It was coined at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010.
The RISC-V Foundation was established in 2015 in Delaware to support and manage open source technology, with the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a founding member.
Other founders include Google, Qualcomm, Western Digital, Hitachi and Samsung. Other Chinese members include Huawei, ZTE, Tencent and Alibaba Cloud. In total, the association has more than 300 corporate, academic and other institutional members around the world
Foundation fled the US
In 2020, the Foundation was established in Switzerland as the RISC-V International Association, which left the United States to avoid potential disruption due to then-President Donald Trump’s anti-China trade policies. For more information on this, see Open-source IC architecture from the ground up in China.
The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) mentioned by Gabriele Columbro is part of the GNU Project, a collaborative free software development effort founded in 1978 by Richard Stallman of MIT.
Linux, the open software kernel created in the early 1990s by Swedish-Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds, is normally used with the GNU operating system.
Linux mascot Tux. Image: AnalyticSteps
GCC consists of free software programs from the GNU Project and other parties, created in an open environment to “attract a larger team of developers, to ensure that GCC and the GNU System work across multiple architectures and diverse environments.” GCC is one of the world’s largest free software programs.
GNU defines itself as “an operating system that is free software – that is, it respects users’ freedom.” The “four essential freedoms” are,
The freedom to run the program the way you want, for whatever purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make your computer do the way you want it to. Access to the source code is a prerequisite for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community the chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a prerequisite for this.
Freedom to Redistribute “means you are free to redistribute copies, with or without modification, for free or for a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere.”
The explanation goes on to note that:
Sometimes government export control regulations and trade sanctions may limit your freedom to distribute copies of programs internationally. Software developers do not have the power to override or lift these restrictions, but what they can and should do is refuse to enforce them as terms of use of the program. In this way, the restrictions do not affect activities and people outside the jurisdictions of these governments. Thus, free software licenses should not require compliance with non-trivial export regulations as a condition of exercising any of the essential freedoms.
According to the Linux Foundation, open source technologies that are published and made publicly available are not subject to the Export Administration Regulations of the Bureau of Industry and Security of the US Department of Commerce.
China has been involved in RISC-V from the start and that has proven to be a very good idea, especially given the liberal and increasing use of sanctions by the Biden administration.
Follow this writer on Twitter: @ScottFo83517667
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